The Flight Attendant(11)

He liked soccer, she remembered, and had played it at college. He liked squash even more, and played it still.

The notion that he, too, was a boozer—at least for one night—caused her to feel a deep, wistful ache in her heart. Everyone who drank the way she did had a reason, she supposed, and she had never pressed him for his. Did he have one? Now she’d never know. Certainly he had never wondered about her own private pain.

He smoked. She hadn’t kissed a man in a while who did, and with Alex it hadn’t been like kissing an ashtray. It had felt decadent in all the right ways. He said he only smoked when he traveled overseas.

In his hotel room, they had started on the bed as soon as he’d returned, atop the crimson bedspread, but then he had brought her to the shower. She’d been surprised, unsure whether she should be more stunned by his astonishing willpower that moment or insulted in some way that she didn’t quite want to parse, but she had gone along and she was glad. They had made love there, her knees on that marble bench, his hands and fingers around her, between her legs, and then he had washed her hair.

And that recollection made her choke on a small, audible sob right there in her jump seat.

“God, you’re crying,” Megan whispered, her tone walking the tightrope between solicitous and annoyed. “Can I do something?”

“No.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

Cassie sniffed and wiped her face with her fingers. “I don’t know,” she lied. “I swear I don’t. But I’m fine. Or I’ll be fine.”

Afterward, Miranda had arrived. Then Miranda had left and Cassie had planned to leave, too. But Alex had led her instead back to that astonishing bedroom, where they had made love again. They polished off the little bottle of arak they found in the minibar. (At least she believed at the time they had finished it; when she had wiped the blue glass down with the washcloth in the morning, she had heard some liquid sloshing around the bottom.) Then they went back to the vodka. For some reason, he’d had trouble unscrewing the cap and accidentally broken the bottle on the side of the nightstand. (Or had he smashed it on purpose in frustration?) Instead of cleaning it up, they’d just laughed. She thought she had gotten dressed to leave. But it was less than a blur, it was a void. She’d been naked when she awoke. What the hell happened to climbing back into her skirt and blouse and returning to her hotel?

God, it was just like so many of the other times she had woken up naked and hungover in bed with a guy, with only the slightest idea how she had gotten there—except this time the guy was dead.

She took stock once more, trying to make sense of what she had done. What she might have done. Had he attacked her and she had defended herself? Possibly, but not likely. They’d had sex twice that she could recall. Still, no means no. Passed out isn’t consent. What if behind the blackout is this: He is trying to have sex with her and she is resisting? They’re drunk, they’re both drunk. He is upon her, he won’t stop, and she is pounding him on his head, his face, his back. She is trying to scratch him, and he is just growing angrier and more violent. She sees nearby the remnants of that bottle of Stoli. Perhaps some of the broken pieces are even on the nightstand. She reaches for one—that jagged shoulder, maybe, gripping the neck like a knife—and she lashes out at him. She slashes him across his throat. She can see in her mind the backhand motion, the resultant gash.

And then she falls back to sleep.

She wished she had looked more closely at the body that morning. She hadn’t. She saw Alex’s neck and that was enough. She had seen his eyes were closed, but otherwise she hadn’t studied his head or his back or his arms. She honestly didn’t know precisely where else she might have stabbed him.

And yet when she looked back on her history, it just didn’t make sense that she would have attacked him if he was trying once again to have sex with her. A part of her life was—dear God—blackout sex. It happened. She knew from too many mornings with too many creepy guys that it did. She presumed (and the idea caused her stomach once more to churn) that she was more likely to allow herself to be raped.

To. Be. Raped. The awfulness of the expression led her to groan softly to herself.

Even if she hadn’t killed Alex Sokolov, however, she had cut and run. That was a fact. The poor guy had parents and friends, and he had bled to death in the bed right beside her. And she had left him.

“You’re not fine,” Megan murmured. “This is different from your other, I don’t know, stunts. Something happened.”

“Nothing happened.”

“People don’t cry over nothing.”

But then there was the plane’s chime and they were above ten thousand feet, and she could no longer cry. She had to start work. She had to wash her face and reapply her makeup. She unstrapped and stood, resolved to be as charming and efficient as ever.

And yet as she stared at herself in the small mirror in the small bathroom, as she looked at the lines she was hiding under her eyes, the lines she artfully concealed beside her eyes, as she noted the way that the blue of her iris seemed a little less vibrant than it had when she was young—even surrounded by the moth-silk lines of hangover red around them—she felt the tears welling up once again. She recalled something her father had said to her when she was a little girl: you bury the dead and move on. It was a few years before he was so hammered that he crashed the Dodge Colt into a telephone pole with his younger daughter in the backseat; it was long before he accidentally (at least she presumed it was accidental) killed himself and a couple of teenagers who were driving home from Lexington and happened to be in the right lane when he—drunk again—was in the wrong one. She’d been eight at the time he’d given her this piece of advice, and she hadn’t, as she had hoped, been allowed to ascend to the next-level ballet class with two of her friends. The teacher didn’t believe she was ready.